Storing User Data

I wanted to know what the typical way of storing User Data is. Obviously, just saving it in a formatted text file is not very secure. There was some sort of reason we didn't want to store it in a database, but I cannot remember what that reason was at the moment. Isn't data supposed to be encrypted and decrypted or something? How does that work?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

I would of thought storing the data in a text file or some kind of database would be the only way?
You could either password protect it, or like you say, encrypt the stored data..

I'm sure some of the other guys may have better ideas.